In tribute to Shakespeare’s birthday (23rd April 1564) we’ve pulled together a list of other famous people who shared a birthday with the Bard:

Giants of Western Culture

J.M.W. Turner, 1775, was an English painter. Known as the ‘Painter of Light’, Turner was perhaps the greatest landscape painter of the 19th century and his watercolours, oil paintings and engravings are now regarded as a predecessor to Impressionism.

Ruggiero Giacomo Maria Giuseppe Emmanuele Raffaele Domenico Vincenzo Francesco Donato Leoncavallo, 1857, was an Italian opera composer, pianist and librettist. His two-act work Pagliacci is one of the most popular works in the repertory.

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, 1858, was a German scientist and theoretical physicist who brought about a new field in the study of physics in the late 19th century with his quantum theory of physics, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1918.

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev, 1891, was the most prolific Russian composer of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Anton Rubinstein Prize at the time of graduation for being the best student pianist. He is most famous for his work on the children’s story, ’Peter and the Wolf ’

Vladimir Nabokov, 1899, was a Russian-American novelist who achieved world fame when he began writing in English. ‘Lolita’, is his most famous novel and one of America’s most famous 20th century novels.